NSA spying ‘weakens US security’

The NSA was no good at decrypting online communications, so they used their authority to spoil encryption technologies to get easy access to communications by people they wanted to spy on, including US citizens, Professor Mathew Green told RT.

A cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University, Professor Mathew
Green, had his blog about NSA spying techniques taken down by the university a short while ago.

RT:Professor, before we talk about what happened to
your blog, your brief reaction to this revelation of data-sharing
with Israel. What do you think Americans will make of the fact
that information about them is going to Israel?

Mathew Green: I think what we’re learning is that no
matter what we think about the story, we cannot get a fix on it,
and the story keeps changing. This is probably the most upsetting part: we don’t know who our
data is being shared, and who is spying on whom at this
point.

RT:You are a cryptographer, what exactly do you do and
what was it about your post that prompted Johns Hopkins
University to react? What did you write?

MG: I wrote a post about these new revelations that came
out last week about the NSA breaking encryption, breaking
cryptography. That’s my research area, so one of the things I do
is write a blog for technical people, but also for journalists
and people who are not cryptographers themselves. I try to
explain these complicated terms and try to explain what it all
means.

So I tried to take a pass at this story and explain what it meant
that the NSA was breaking this technology, and I put it on a blog
post that a lot of people read.

NSA had hard time breaking encryptions

RT:So what is the NSA doing? What is this clandestine
initiative?

MG: I think what we learnt is that the NSA has a hard time breaking
encryptions, so what they’ve done is they actually tried to take the products
that perform encryptions and make them worse, make it
weaker so it is easier for them to break that encryption.

MG: Everything that you’ve just mentioned. Smartphones are
specifically mentioned, your web-browsing, when you’re using your
Gmail account for example, the connections that are supposed to
be encrypted, emails going across the web – all of those things.

NSA is willing to make US security weaker

RT:This really doesn’t come as a big surprise. We knew
that the NSA was spying on people. So is this a major revelation,
or is it something we should really accept as it happens every
day?

MG: What we learnt is that the NSA is willing to make the US security a little bit
weaker. Because remember, it is not just non-US
citizens using these products, it’s Americans, too.

And they want, in a sense, to put our entire industry credibility
on the line to access those communications of whomever they want
to listen to.

RT:When you posted that blog, the university reacted
very quickly. Did they explain why, or do you think they were
forced to act?

MG: I don’t know. The internet tends to make a big deal of
these things. Somebody somewhere made a decision that there might
be a classified material on this blog. The instinct was to shut
the blog down rather than investigate that. I think that was a
mistake. I don’t think I’ll ever know exactly where it came from,
and I hope it never happens again.

RT:But you will carry on blogging and posting material
you think is perfectly legitimate and should be read by
people?

MG: Absolutely, absolutely.

'Never, ever use the Internet'

RT:What about the idea that people think that this
whole initiative is to fight terrorism, is to protect national
and personal security? Don’t we have to accept that surveillance
has to happen these days?

MG: Well, I understand that there has been debate ahead of
us on about “how much spying [is acceptable]”. There is a range
of anywhere from 1 per cent spying to 100 percent spying, and I
think we have to figure out what the right balance is. What we’re
learning is that the American public is not comfortable about
what we’re learning about that balance.

RT:As an expert cryptographer, can you stop yourself
being hacked?

MG: Buy a computer, move down to the basement and never,
ever use the Internet. That’s the best advice I can give you.